[ccmonnett]

For others interested in why ray tracing scales O(log N), this is covered in an earlier video in the NVIDIA "Ray Tracing Essentials" series, specifically this one:

https://youtu.be/ynCxnR1i0QY?t=173

It's timestamped to the discussion of why this is true, but the whole video (like the series, IMO) is very informative, this one focused on "Rasterization vs Ray Tracing".

[sudosysgen]

For someone that doesn't want to watch, the essence of it is that space is world-space is divided in a tree-like structure, which makes traversing the scene as costly as traversing the tree, thus log(n) operations.